Dark, Poor Contrast, Unstable Viewing Angles - The display of the HP 17 disappoints
The HP 17 represents a simple 17.3-inch office notebook from the low-price segment. Hewlett Packard uses a matte black plastic case, which is neither particularly robust, nor does it facilitate maintenance. The latter makes upgrading the working memory unnecessarily difficult. Users who value an optical drive should be pleased with a DVD burner.
Our test unit of the HP 17 is run by a Core-i3 processor of the Comet Lake generation. The CPU offers sufficient computing performance for office and Internet applications. It is surprising that the CPU is unable to run constantly at full Turbo speed in multi-thread operation. On the positive side: The notebook runs mostly quietly and heats up moderately at most.
The display represents the largest weakness of the notebook. Hewlett Packard has equipped the laptop with a dark HD+ display (1600 x 900 pixels) with low contrast and unstable viewing angles, which also does not offer a good color reproduction in the state of delivery. The maximum brightness, which is already low in mains operation, drops even further in battery operation. In addition, the display shows some flickering with a frequency of 250 Hz at brightness levels of 80% and below.
Since Hewlett Packard only uses a WiFi 4 chip (802.11n) in the notebook, it delivers bad WLAN transfer rates. While a Windows operating system is not included, Windows 10 could be installed without any problems - we tried it. All the necessary drivers are available on the HP website. Alternatively, you could use Linux.
Additional information and benchmark results are available in our HP 17-by2437ng review.
